PhD Seminar Series: Patent Disclosure and Inventor Mobility

Patent Disclosure and Inventor Mobility

Speaker: Zijing Yuan

Abstract: Strategic human capital research has long emphasized that firms’ ability to capture value from employee knowledge depends on retaining, redeploying, and bargaining with mobile workers. Yet this literature often assumes that employee knowledge and the signals of that knowledge coexist. We argue that these two elements should be separated. Employees may accumulate valuable knowledge before outside firms can observe it, giving the current employer an information advantage. We study this mechanism in the context of inventor mobility, where the patenting process creates a staged shift in observability. Patent filing provides the current employer with a private signal of inventor's ability, whereas publication makes the information visible to external labor-market audiences. Using an inventor-firm-month panel that links patent records to career histories, we examine how these patent-stage transitions shape internal mobility, external mobility, unemployment, and spinout formation. By separating knowledge from its observability, this study shows that careers are shaped not only by what employees know, but also by when different audiences become able to evaluate what they know.